Halle Berry details how close she came to dying by her own hand when her
marriage to baseball player David Justice hit the rocks.

InStyle Halle Berry has spoken for the first time about her heartbreaking suicide
attempt four years ago.
The sexy star of the new flick "X-Men" says she was so devastated by the
bust-up of her marriage to baseball star David Justice, she decided to end it
all.

Grabbing her two pet Shih Tzus, Berry marched into the garage of her Los
Angeles home, got into her car and started up the engine.

"I sat there for a while and could smell the fumes," she tells the July Issue
of InStyle. "I felt worthless, like such a failure. I worried, what would people think
about my marriage being over?"
But as she breathed in the poisonous air, Berry began to have second thoughts.

"I started to think how selfish I was being. I hadn't thought about my mother
one bit in this whole trauma," Berry says.

"It was a struggle for I don't know how long."
That's when she began praying for an answer - and made "a very serious pact
with God that I would never contemplate taking my own life. Never. Never.
Never."
She grabbed her pets, fled the fume-filled garage and never looked back.

Now engaged to singer Eric Benet, Berry hit another rough patch last February
when she was charged in a hit-and-run car crash.
She received three years probation and 300 hours of community service after
pleading no contest.
But Berry insists she doesn't remember the accident, even though she drove home
and needed 60 stitches to sew up her forehead.
When the cops showed up to quiz her, "I never felt so much fear in my entire
life," Berry, 33, tells In Style.
"There's something very [disturbing] about when the police show up." Berry insists she's paying her debt to society by performing community service.
"Now I can look at myself in the mirror. Nobody can say, 'She got
off.' Because I didn't. Thank God no one was killed. There were blessings that
night."

The woman in the other car, Heta Raythatha, 28, doesn't buy Berry's story.
"[She] left me in a smoking car wreck. She sped off and made no attempt to get
me help. I find everything she has [said] unbelievable," Raythatha told the
mag.